Transience Quotes

• Our lives ... are but a little while, so let them run as sweetly as you can, and give no thought to grief from day to day. For time is not concerned to keep our hopes, but hurries on its business, and is gone.

  Euripides

  Running, Grief, Giving

  Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (1959). “Euripides”

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• Worlds on worlds are rolling ever From creation to decay, Like the bubbles on a river Sparkling, bursting, borne away.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Rivers, Rolling, Decay

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1853). “The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Complete in One Volume”, p.317

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• Ambition is a meteor-gleam; Fame a restless airy dream; Pleasures, insects on the wing Round Peace, th' tend rest flow'r of spring.

  Robert Burns

  Dream, Spring, Ambition

  Robert Burns (1901). “The Poetry of Robert Burns: Posthumous pieces”

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• Because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer.

  Shunryu Suzuki

  Change, Suffering, Management

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• Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure. But unfortunately, although it is true, it is difficult for us to accept it. Because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer.

  Shunryu Suzuki

  Change, Perfect, Worry

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• A ruin is not just something that happened long ago to someone else; its history is that of us all, the transience of power, of ideas, of all human endeavors.

  George Schaller

  Death, Long Ago, Ideas

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• In my old age, I have come to believe that love is not a noun but a verb. An action. Like water, it flows to its own current. If you were to corner it in a dam, true love is so bountiful it would flow over. Even in separation, even in death, it moves and changes. It lives within memory, in the haunting of a touch, the transience of a smell, or the nuance of a sigh. It seeks to leave a trace like a fossil in the sand, a leaf burning into baking asphalt.

  Alyson Richman

  Memories, Believe, Moving

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• Listen, all creeping things, the bell of transience.

  Kobayashi Issa

  Listening, Bells

  Issa Kobayashi (1991). “The dumpling field: haiku of Issa”, Swallow Press

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• Joy and sorrow, beauty and deformity, equally pass away.

  Saadi

  Joy, Sorrow, Passing Away

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• Cities and Thrones and Powers
  Stand in Time's eye,
  Almost as long as flowers,
  Which daily die

  Rudyard Kipling

  Time, Flower, Eye

  Rudyard Kipling, Eileen Gillooly, Jim Sharpe (2000). “Rudyard Kipling”, p.39, Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.

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• Friendships offer good practice in accepting the transience of experience and the persistence of feeling.

  Stephanie Mills

  Friendship, Persistence, Practice

  Stephanie Mills (2003). “Epicurean Simplicity”, p.123, Island Press

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• Impermanence is a principle of harmony. When we don't struggle against it, we are in harmony with reality.

  Pema Chodron

  Struggle, Buddhism, Reality

  Pema Chodron (2000). “When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times”, p.78, Shambhala Publications

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• Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them.

  Paulo Coelho

  Losing A Loved One, Loss, Forever

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• I like the transience of Klimt paintings.

  Steve Coogan

  Painting

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• Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Media, Journalism, Glory

  Malcolm Muggeridge (1966). “Tread softly, for you tread on my jokes”

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• Every great work of art ... is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life.

  Azar Nafisi

  Art, Betrayal, Infidelity

  Azar Nafisi (2003). “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books”, p.47, Random House

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• We are not sure of sorrow, And joy was never sure; Today will die tomorrow; Time stoops to no man's lure.

  Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Men, Joy, Sorrow

  Algernon Charles Swinburne (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated)”, p.250, Delphi Classics

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• Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Grief, Joy, Poetry

  Jane Hirshfield (2015). “Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World”, p.178, Knopf

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• But life is just a party, and parties weren't meant to last.

  Prince

  Life, Song, Party

  Song: 1999 The Hits Mix

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• The likeness of the world? A shadow! And world's glory? A dream!

  Franz Grillparzer

  Dream, Shadow, World

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• As generations come and go, Their arts, their customs, ebb and flow; Fate, fortune, sweep strong powers away, And feeble, of themselves, decay.

  William Wordsworth

  Art, Strong, Fate

  William Wordsworth (1849). “The Poems of William Wordsworth”, p.339

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• We are things of a day. What are we? What are we not? The shadow of a dream is man, no more.

  Pindar

  Dream, Men, Shadow

  Pindar (1942). “Some Odes of Pindar: In New English Versions”

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• So passeth, in the passing of a day,
  Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre

  Edmund Spenser

  Bud, Passing, Passings

  'The Faerie Queen' (1596) bk. 2, canto 12, st. 75

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• When we are fully mindful of the transience of things - an impending return home from an overseas adventure, a graduation, our child boarding the school bus for the first day of kindergarten, a close colleague changing jobs, a move to a new city - we are more likely to appreciate [be grateful for] and savor the remaining time that we do have. Although bittersweet experiences also make us sad, it is this sadness that prompts us, instead of taking it for granted, to come to appreciate the positive aspects of our vacation, colleague, or hometown; it's 'now or never.'

  Sonja Lyubomirsky

  Gratitude, Jobs, Children

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• civilization is a transient sickness.

  Robinson Jeffers

  Civilization, Sickness, Illness

  Robinson Jeffers, Tim Hunt (1988). “The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers: 1928-1938”, p.158, Stanford University Press

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